calls on me as her witness. The strength of habit! I am unable to loosen my tongue and speak my mind.
Tonight, I hold a mannequin in my arms the size of Jean Luze. A mannequin so perfect it would appease Messalina’s ardor. [16] I close my eyes, offering my naked body. My imagination rages! The hand stroking mine is his. I am taut as a bow. Gasping for air, I whisper his name. My head roils on the pillow. I am no longer seeing him but another. Who is it? I don’t dare comprehend. Despite my efforts, a feeling of frustration lingers. I come with lassitude, with regret and remorse, as if my body disapproved of this duality.
Freedom is an inmost power. That is why society limits it. In the light of day our thoughts would make monsters and madmen of us. Even those with the most limited imagination conceal something horrifying. Our innumerable flaws are proof of our monstrously primitive origin. Rough drafts that we are. And we will remain so as long as we lack the courage to hack a path through the tangled undergrowth of life and walk with eyes fixed on the truth. The hard conclusion to an ephemeral life on the road to perfection. One can’t reach it without sacrifice and suffering. I would like to be sure that Beethoven died satisfied to have written his concertos. Without this certainty, what would be the point of the painful anxiety of a Cezanne searching for a color that escapes him? Or of the anguish of a Dostoyevsky grasping at God in the thoughts swarming within the hellish complexity of the soul! All of them proof of another life, mysterious and intangible, clamoring for its share of immortality. Each of us must find within ourselves the possibility to meet such demands. It is a matter of will and action. Of choosing to be puppets or to be human beings. As for me, I sometimes feel I have gone off course, standing for years in front of a door that would not open for me and that I was afraid to force. Afraid perhaps out of sheer terror of facing the truth. When the time comes to follow my own path, I lose my nerve. Oh, what wouldn’t I give to seize the essential thread of my thought once and for all! Something I can’t define is rising from my innermost being in short-lived flashes. And here I am, my hands open and more empty than ever.
Life continues in its monotonous and petty course. Fortunately, I carry within me a world quite different from the one I live in. I have even broken with Annette. Her mediocre taste repels me. I aspire to find some kind of happiness beyond myself. Now I want our fates to be independent of each other. I don’t like this boy who paws her in the evening on the veranda, this Paul Trudor who’s been after her since the ball.
“She’s about to make a bad match,” Felicia confessed to me warily. “Try and speak to her.”
And why should I be against it, personally? He’s the man she needs. He’ll whittle away until her fire dies down. I hear Annette laughing. Her old waterfall of laughter. It’s over, Jean Luze will never be able to turn her head again. She brushes right past him, undulating in her tight skirt, and blows a mouthful of smoke in his face.
“You know,” she says to him, “I can’t make up my mind about your son; he’s so small that I can’t tell whether he’s handsome or ugly.”
Jean Luze laughs. He shakes Paul Trudor’s hand and watches them as they leave, entwined around each other…
I can’t help it, I like his reactions. Even looking at him through others’ eyes, he does not disappoint me. Or maybe I can’t be objective when it comes to him. I know passion blinds, that one lends people and things whatever color one wishes. That’s how one day I got it into my head to water a pretty plant Annette had brought back from Bob Charivi’s, marveling at how it seemed to revive with cool water. I only realized my idiocy when I heard my sister laughing because the plant was in fact artificial.
“No doubt my eyesight is going,” was the excuse I tried to make.
By what miracle had I seen this plant sparkle at the touch of water? Ideas are powerful, mysteriously so. Doesn’t everything, good and bad, have its own smell? I have always compared people to pure or rancid things, depending on what I associate them with. I have to admit that when it comes to Jean Luze the comparisons are more and more flattering Temperaments made of whole cloth displease me. I don’t like the born killer or the long- suffering saint. There is both violence and gentleness in this man, strength and weakness. Could he, frail and pure as he is, appease this swamp of desires that at times reduces me to a sordid little beast?
This morning, Annette announced her plans to marry.
“What?” Felicia cried out, but caught herself quickly. “I congratulate you, Annette,” she added, lowering her eyes.
“Good for you,” Jean Luze said simply.
“Do you like Paul?”
“You’re marrying him, not me, right?”
His tone seemed equivocal, as if he was nursing some rancor. Or is he, like us, simply unhappy about this match?
“Claire,” Annette told me afterward, “get ready to spend a tidy sum. What I want is a really beautiful lace dress. And you, Jean, what will you give me? At the store there is a gold bracelet I like.”
“It’s yours,” he replied simply.
“Find a way to order my trousseau from another town. Even the Syrian stores are going bankrupt here and all you can find is junk,” she added.
“Monsieur Trudor,” Jean Luze suggested enigmatically, “travels often enough to Port-au-Prince. Surely he could do a favor for his future daughter-in-law.”
“Now, that’s a terrific idea,” Annette replied.
Felicia waited for Annette to leave, then looking irate she said to me:
“A black man! A black man in our family. And one of the lowest sort! Can you believe this?”
“My God!” Jean Luze said, stroking her hair indulgently, “there is no need to get worked up about this.”
“It’s not so much the color of his skin that I mind, but his vulgarity and especially his father,” she stammered, a little ashamed of herself.
The wedding preparations have turned the house upside down. Annette comes in from time to time with lingerie that she displays on the dining room table for us admire: bras, nightgowns, slips, nothing is left out. And Jean Luze must give his opinion. He knows about such things, she insists, he’s traveled a great deal.
She opens her arms, buoyant and charming.
“Oh, if only I could go away, far, far away!”
She leans toward Jean Luze.
“Tell us some stories,” she begs him. “What was your life like? What did you used to do? You must have been with so many women…”
He gets up. A little too abruptly.
“I don’t like telling stories,” he said coldly, “and I never had much time to carry on with women…”
He walks away. I look at Felicia. Her eyes follow him with concern.
“He never talks about his past,” she says slowly, “never…”
“Not even to you?” Annette asks.
“Not even to me.”
She gets up.
He has confided in me though. Does he trust me so much that he would honor me with secrets he keeps from his wife? Or is it that he can let himself go with an old maid, telling her snippets of his life from time to time precisely to spare the one he loves, to keep her away from what’s past in order to preserve present love and future joys for her? Too bad! I will still have secrets to share with him, a painful, miserable past that I will help him bear. How I wish I could be sure he has never really confided in Felicia…
The baby is still quite ugly. He snores softly in his crib. Felicia fusses over him like a mother hen. She would hide him under her wings if she had any. Since his arrival she has never trusted me with him. On the other hand, I’m the one who washes the bottles and who keeps track of feedings. I have always had a supporting role in life. I resign myself to it more and more poorly. I will never love this kid. He is so small I have trouble believing he will ever grow up. He’s all phlegm. I have no desire to take him in my arms. His nose is always clogged with mucus and his skin is still peeling.
“My beautiful darling,” his mother whispers to him, “my cutie!”
